Centre for Image Guided Therapy - A Theranostic Approach to Patients with Cancer

我们的愿景是基于磁共振（MR）技术的创新，为癌症患者带来革命性的诊断、风险分层和治疗。新的治疗系统将基于优化的“目标生成”、特定的“目标验证”和精确的“目标破坏”策略。我们使用成像技术来找出癌症在体内的位置。我们把拍摄图像找到病灶的过程称为“目标生成”。虽然成像有助于发现疾病，但我们并不总是知道图像上的病变是癌症还是良性的。此外，如果一个病变是癌症，我们通常不知道这对个别病人意味着什么。通过解释，我们可能知道癌症在体内扩散的特定分布会给一组患者带来较差的结果，例如，50%的患者在5年后存活；然而，我们常常无法判断一个病人是否会有50%的存活率。了解成像检测到的病变的性质，以及这对治疗选择和整体治疗结果的影响，被称为“目标验证”。我们的提案旨在建立一个平台，以允许我们在临床前“目标生成”方面取得的新方法和进展稳健而快速地开发用于临床应用。它还寻求开发最好的成像技术，并将这些技术与对癌症细胞和分子环境的理解结合起来，以显着改善“目标验证”。我们建议的第三个方面是发展新技术，为个别癌症部位提供精确的治疗。我们称之为“目标破坏”。现有的一系列技术，我们的目标是提供一个环境，在这个环境中，最好和最有前途的技术可以很容易地从概念到临床应用。我们在前列腺癌的治疗方面有着良好的记录，我们试图将其扩展到其他癌症部位，最初是肺癌和胃肠道癌症。我们的建议是通过在伦敦大学学院建立一个专门的图像引导治疗中心，将一群在成像、外科和工程方面具有互补技能的科学家聚集在一起。在此范围内，我们寻求建立一个转化成像设施，它将反映临床环境中可用的成像类型，并且还将允许科学家使用尖端设备，使他们能够快速而有力地发展技术进步，使其能够应用于患者利益。

Our vision is to revolutionise diagnosis, risk stratification and therapy for people with cancer based on innovations in magnetic resonance (MR) technology. The new system of care will be based on developing a strategy of optimized 'target generation', specific 'target verification' and precise 'target destruction'We use imaging to find out where cancer lies within the body. We call the process of taking an image to find a lesion 'target generation'. Whilst imaging helps to find disease we don't always know whether a lesion on an image is cancer or whether it is benign. Also, if a lesion is cancer we don't often know what that means for the individual patient. By way of explanation, we may know that a particular distribution of cancer spread within the body confers a poorer outcome for a group of patients e.g. a 50% of patients survive after 5-years; however, we often can't tell whether an individual patient will fall into the 50% that survive. Understanding the nature of a lesion detected on imaging and how this impacts on treatment choices and overall treatment outcome is termed 'target verification'.Our proposal seeks to establish a platform to allow new methods and advances we have been making in pre-clinical 'target generation' to be robustly and rapidly developed for clinical use. It also seeks to develop the best imaging technologies and combine these with an understanding of the cellular and molecular environment of cancers in order to significantly improve 'target verification'. The third aspect to our proposal is the development of new technologies to deliver precise treatment to individual cancer sites. We term this 'target destruction'. A range of technologies exist and we aim to provide the environment where the best and most promising of these can be easily translated from conception of idea all the way to clinical application. We have a strong track record in this area with therapies for prostate cancer and we seek to extend this to other cancer sites, initially lung and gastrointestinal cancers. Our proposal brings together a group of scientist with complementary skills in imaging, surgery and engineering in one location through establishing a dedicated Centre for Image Guided Therapy within University College London. Within this we seek to establish a translational imaging facility, which will reflect the type of imaging available within the clinical environment, and will also allow scientists access to the cutting-edge equipment to enable them to develop technological advances rapidly and robustly to a stage that they can be applied for patient benefit.